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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
CUP: Chase Bio — Jeff Gordon
Jeff Gordon will be making a ninth attempt to win a fifth championship...
Tom Jensen  |  Posted September 08, 2010   Charlotte, NC
Jeff Gordon remains winless this season but is still a contender for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Championship. (Photo: Getty Images)
JEFF GORDON, Hendrick Motorsports
Points position: 2nd
2010 season: 0 wins, 10 top-fives, 13 top-10s
Defining moment: 31st-place, Texas Motor Speedway

If you want a true wild card in the 2010 edition of the Chase for the Sprint Cup, look no further than Jeff Gordon, the four-time series champion who will be making his ninth attempt to win a fifth title.

PHOTOS: 2010 Chase Contenders - Jeff Gordon

Gordon’s performance this season has been all over the board. He’s second in points and clearly had the opportunity to win several races already, especially early in the year. And his 10 top-five finishes are second only to the 11 amassed by Kevin Harvick.

He’s also demonstrated a renewed passion and sense of urgency, tangling with his own teammate Jimmie Johnson at Texas and Talladega and earning the enmity of a number of competitors for his aggressive driving at Infineon Raceway in June.

But his season has been wildly inconsistent. In the first five races of the year, Gordon finished better than 14th only once, a third-place run at Las Vegas, where he led 219 of 267 laps. He then nearly won at Phoenix and Martinsville, where he had the dominant car at both races, only to lose out on late-race restarts.

In a five-race stretch from Michigan in June to Chicagoland Speedway in mid-July, Gordon never finished worse than fifth, as he and crew chief Steve Letarte seemed to really hit their collective strides.

Lately, though, he’s cooled off considerably: In the last six races, Gordon’s best finish was a sixth-place run at Pocono, and in four of those six races, he hasn’t led a single lap. In fact, he’s only led a total of two laps in the last four races.
Jeff Gordon could be a wild card in the Chase. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Then there’s the whole matter of points: Johnson and Denny Hamlin have five race victories apiece this season, meaning they’ll start the Chase with 50 bonus points. Gordon, who is winless, has none. That will put him in a hole to start out.

Still, Gordon professes to be confident about his chances this year.

PHOTOS: 2010 Chase Contenders - Jeff Gordon

“I think that we are really solid,” he said. “I think we’ve got an awesome shot at the championship. What I don’t like is us spotting the No. 11 (Hamlin) and the No. 48 (Johnson) 50 points going into it. That is what I don’t like.”

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEED.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100 and e-mail him at Jensen is the author of “Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers Do In Pursuit of Speed,” and has appeared on numerous television and radio shows. Jensen is the past President of the National Motorsports Press Association and an NMPA Writer of the Year.

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Tom Jensen

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